Research Topic: "law"

The organizational arrangement of the borders on the periphery of the Roman empire played a central role in Roman defensive strategy. One of the most important organizational innovations of the Late Roman Period was the establishment of frontiers, which were usually entrusted to a military functionary bearing the title of dux limitis. The goal of this doctoral project is to investigate the organizational structures of a Late Roman ducatus in the region of Cyrenaica (present-day eastern Libya), structures which were largely shaped by military requirements.

The project has analyzed legal forms of private land use in the colonies and in the province of the Roman Empire, pointing out their underlying relationship with fundamental legal and governmental decisions.

This project developed hydrological models that facilitate a differentiated understanding of actual water balance conditions before and as a result of implementation of water management measures in the western Mediterranean region.

This research project examined and evaluated the foundations and regulations of Roman law concerning water usage and distribution. The legal regulatory options were investigated and compared based on an analysis of juridical, gromatical and literary sources.

Within the scope of this research project, technical and legal water management structures on the Iberian Peninsula that have survived from the Roman and Moorish periods were systematically collected, categorized and chronologized.

This concerted project investigates the two urban centers Petra and Gadara and their surrounding countryside using comparative formulations and methods in seeking to determine the causes of similar and dissimilar developments and phenomena. In order to gain an understanding of the importance of the interaction between environmental and social factors in the formation and historical development of the urban form, interaction between several disciplines is required (e.g. geography, topography, geology, meteorology, technical sciences, ecology, demography, sociology, building law, building economy and cultural studies).

The project has, as part of a more encompassing interest in how experts create and manage their respective microcosms, investigated the forms of personal and of non-personal constructions of authority in ancient Greek knowledge traditions with a focus on theoretical knowledge. Proceeding from sociological and theoretical work on authority, Markus Asper has channeled his input into three conferences and the ensuing proceedings as well as 15 papers devoted to aspects of the overarching cluster of questions.

The aim of the project was to investigate modern economical discourse in Russia in connection with the complex reception of the Aristotelian theory of oikonomia and the Christian history of salvation handed down from Orthodox ecclesiastical law. That concept puts an emphasis on positive, minor deviations for the sake of an overall purpose, an axiology accompanied by terminologically vague discourse.

The research project continued the work of the former research group (B-I-1) Surveying and Limitation that examined ways in which spaces are defined and constituted through acquisition and demarcation. Five research fields of this former group were investigated.

The infrastructures of late antiquity were of fundamental importance to the politico-military, ecclesiastical and economic organization of the so-called “Germanic” kingdoms that succeeded the Roman Empire.